And, with inevitable encation spreading across Web, what is its long-term replacement? Is it App market dystopia, or some sort of Metaverse system, or could it be fragmented regional Webs? We have been seeing more Gitea repository in Chinese, leaked Russian footage in Telegram, European developer anecdotes from Mastodon, etc.
But over the years creators have become less dependent on Google ad money, instead relying more on sponsorships, paid subscriptions ala Patreon and superchat style systems for live streams. Leaving the audience as the only leverage YouTube has.
Now on top of that Google is creating incentives for people to look for alternatives. If it's already reasonable for people to self host alternate frontends like Invidious, it's only a matter of time till a gradual shift and fragmentation starts to occur.
I think Google would've had a much easier time of forcing people to not use adblock if they hadn't spent the past decade burning good will with the way they treat content creators.
This already happened with many of the right-wing creators that were banned from YT some time back. Many of these creators upload to multiple 'alt-tech' sites (e.g. Rumble), and rely on sponsors or direct support, which isn't locked to YT.
Then we'd have things like PeerTube built on top of this distributed social network, which would handle fetching video thumbnails, metadata, etc and presenting it in a YouTube style interface.
These are both incredibly difficult, and why Youtube and Twitch have basically zero competition.
I know there are other implementations that support the same filters, but it still feels like a big lynchpin in the escalating adblocker war.
Youtube was revolutionary when it came out but now it doesn’t offer much other than discoverablity. Since you need to work hard to be discovered anyway you can do that via X (etc.)
Just need some people to make the tools so average jo can do it.
H4CK 7H3 P14N37
Presumably people that _actually run_ PiHole instances (like myself) will know this, which makes me wonder what demographic is making this appear as a valid suggestion.
If everyone just constantly tries to circumvent YouTube's evolving adblock-detection methods, at some point YouTube is going to do something drastic.
There's no way of knowing what they might resort to, but usually efforts to thwart the pirates end up hurting the legitimate paying customers instead.
There aren't many online platforms/services that I think provide enough value to justify their own existence, nevermind sending them money on a monthly basis. YouTube Premium though is most certainly one of the exceptions.
Not even touching on the uploading and live streaming aspects, just the fact that you can stream full HD content 24/7 to multiple devices, embed the videos on other websites and it works perfectly with essentially zero down time is incredible. Paying like $10 a month to avoid any advertising at all PLUS access to their music streaming service... subscribing is such a no-brainer to me.
(I mean, that’s the hard variation of what I said… A softer variation would allow for public-corporate partnerships, or would merely regulate corporate activity much more.)
> These filters have been obsolete since a long time, no content blockers is using these. They are just being spread by non-official sources since at least last June
Fixed it for you.
After years of procrastinating, I'm finally gonna get around to setting up a basic homelab to run pihole. Thanks, youtube execs and bean counters, for kicking my lazy ass into gear on this!
In a way, I kinda wish that ads worked as well as youtube suggestions. If one has good enough willpower / mental health to not use youtube as a coping device, suggestions are really amazing. I've seen so many great conference talks and other videos that have O(100) views that I would have never heard about otherwise. Ads, however, still think I'm gonna overpay for aliexpress drop-shipped items, or that I need to make a basic purchase into a way of life (e.g. that cooler company that now is somehow a lifestyle brand).
It’s not even the biggest reason why PP is my least favorite streaming platform, since I have a workaround (cast from phone, which for some reason works).
I would have been okay with paying for a subscription if it was to support the website or its creators – but I take manipulation attempts very badly.
One can only conclude that some executive at Google is still dead-set on making YouTube Music happen, and YouTube Premium will continue to suffer as a result.
Google is fully in the right for blocking ad blockers, banning users, or whatever. Might even end up having some profitable years for those bans.
I would also be incentivized by the ability to control how much of my money goes to each creator.
Yeah, you might be losing the game, you are winning the game as well.
But I also recommend purchasing YouTube Premium if you watch a decent amount. I find it to be a great value.
You're (Youtube, not OP hah) telling me i provided $14/m in ad revenue? Of course not.
I'd insta-buy if i could just pay to skip any ads i actually would have watched. Give me a stat showing me how many ads i missed, and how much i owe. Justify the cost you're forcing on me.
Instead i'll just drop youtube and give money to some other service that doesn't feel like it's focused on gaming me.
I'd pay $2/m, or even $4 bucks, for ad-free Youtube, but I'm not buying an additional music service I don't want or need.
Related parallel thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881771
Mix well with Tailscale (or your mesh VPN of choice) and enjoy.
1) Don't log in to google, block ads. Data collected by google is lower value, resulting in less targeted internet-wide marketing, including on youtube itself when you clear your browsing session.
2) Log in. Lose time to ads. Trying to avoid this may put your entire google account at risk. Also, you gain highly targeted marketing thanks to higher quality data collection. Youtube's viewing suggestions are targeted, limiting discovery, and may become highly pigeonholed over time.
3) Pay for Premium. All the same as 2) but with less ads.
As a consumer, logging out of google and blocking youtube ads has been made by google a better experience than their own premium product. Only the producers of the majority of youtube's product are required to consume what google is doing.
! 2023-10-14 https://www.youtube.com
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! 2023-10-13 https://www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com##.opened
www.youtube.com##tp-yt-paper-dialog.ytd-popup-container.style-scope > .ytd-popup-container.style-scope
||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p
##.ytp-endscreen-content
youtube.com##.ytp-scroll-min.ytp-pause-overlay
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-covering-shadow-top
youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-covering-overlay
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
! 2021-06-10 https://www.statista.com
statista.com##.vertical-align-content.default.otCenterRounded
instagram.com##.RnEpo
instagram.com##body:style(overflow: auto !important)
! 2023-07-08 https://www.roadandtrack.com
www.roadandtrack.com##journey-modal-meter
The best defense is to purge caches and update filter sets every day.
edit: from another comment: https://x.com/gorhill/status/1713305785659211991
What makes YouTube's ads annoying:
- the number of them
2 ads at the start is way too much. 1 max.
Middle of video ads should be content creator controlled.
- the ads they choose to show
Google showing me the same few very annoying (to me) ads and gives me no option to avoid those specific ads.
I have done the unthinkable and given up on YouTube as a daily site I visit. Now I will only visit it if I have to - e.g. someone link to it. Yes, I hate those specific ads that much.
Google has done an outstanding job to use their position making YouTube the streaming platform of the Web, GCP incentives, dominance in smart TV, Google account integration, Android etc. This isn't mentioned enough.
Now we're seeing a strategy towards Premium and anti ad blocking patterns while they remain top and any alternatives just can't get a footing in this space to compete.
They are, sort of.
As a content creator you pick the position for the ads, but it doesn't mean they'll pop up there for everyone, there's only a chance they'll show up there. For example you could put mid-roll ads every minute, but youtube will only pick one of those positions so the viewer only sees an ad every 10 minutes or so, the real "cooldown time" depends on what data youtube has on the viewer.
Content creators can disable mid-roll ads completely.
I tend to spend too much time watching YT anyway. This will help saving some time to do useful work or gaming instead.
Apart from just Ads, I use the "Block Element" feature of uBlock to cut down on a lot of other visual noise within sites. For youtube I block the giant rows of "related" video suggestions (which I guess you could consider as ads), and youtube shorts from showing up in my subscription feed.
I think society as a whole will loose out more than its individuals on having this extremely broad (dis)information sharing nixed.
There are anecdotes from creators in this thread explaining they get a lot more from premium than from ads.
I hate ads. I like supporting creators. And I like paying for services I use.
YouTube premium is absolutely worth it. The number of people I know with very good salaries who refuse to pay a small amount a month for something they use constantly (this or other examples) never ceases to amaze me.
24 February 2022 virtually gave the whole country YouTube Premium.
Can i just use proton vpn to make the purchase at that price point?
Or do I need to create a separate google account, and then keep accessing YT while using a VPN with Ukraine location?
Changing the shield setting to "aggressive" hasn't beaten the block.
But I've heard from others that they use Brave with "standard" settings and still don't see the block. That makes me think they aren't in the A/B group and NOT that Brave has found a way to adequately block it.
See also, the “well, if they start abusing it, we can pass a new law to handle that!”. Yeah ok that’ll be great in 10 years, but what about now?
Manifest v3, the chrome Secure Enclave/remote attestation of ad delivery, and other measures are going to be coming down the pipe at an accelerated rate, and there's absolutely nothing to put the brakes on them anymore, because we now have a browser monoculture run by the world's largest adtech oligopoly. But people got their emotional victory over apple users and the app-review process.
Next stage: Youtube requires chrome, install it or get out. And I better see some remote attestation on that request, if you want FREE video. Why wouldn't they, when chrome/chromium control like 95% of every web request that's not iOS?
Now we get to do it again with RCS, where it's an "open" system that's chock-full of proprietary google extensions that google refuses to license or interoperate on. But everyone will nod along at how bad imessage is, and deliver us right into google's own proprietary system.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
I pay for premium so this won't affect me, but it's always interesting seeing the efforts even a trillion dollar company has to go through to fight against a relative few very determined "hackers" underground.
That annoys more people, so they learn how to add block (or ask their friends for help).
It’s a vicious cycle and it’s part of why the ads are just getting worse.
We’ve only found three income models for web content:
1. Cover it with ads 2. Sell it/paywall 3. Patronage pays for it
That’s basically it. People don’t want to see ads. And don’t want to pay.
I won’t view ads plus I won’t pay equals almost everything goes.
“I want better service but don’t want to pay” is not a customer you’re going to make a lot of money chasing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw3G80bplTg
When a MF tryin to block your ad with an adblocker, this will block the MF'n adblocker that's blocking yo...... ads.
Bah, I'm not sitting through 6 ads on a 15 minute video review.
They intend to "go nuclear" and do that via their "Web Integrity API" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit... Also previously discussed a few times here on HN.
given that in-stream ads still have blocking/ignoring methods I think that if this arms race keeps going that ultimately the data (video, whatever) is going to be stuffed behind some hard authentication barrier of some sort -- and then traditional piracy methods will take over like single-user-rebroadcast/etc.
TBH baking it into the video stream is probably the easiest path. The whole video doesn't have to be re-encoded if the ad is spliced in. This is a "soft lockdown" since the ad can theoretically be manually skipped by the user, but its probably good enough.
No, you can't adblock remote attestation. Trust me, the whole idea is cryptographically sound (with a proper implementation of course), people have been building out the remote attestation/TPM space for 20 years now. It is unambiguously possible to use a TPM to detect modification of BIOS, OS, drivers, or anything else in the system, and you effectively cannot modify the TPM at all, and it has minimal attack surface (it just is a key-signing machine, essentially).
random practical explanation from someone's college papers: https://seclab.stanford.edu/pcl/cs259/projects/cs259_final_l...
Every time it's brought up (like I previously suggested that it could be used by NVIDIA/etc to disrupt mining operations from a VBIOS level) there's people who think there is some easy runaround and if there was the whole idea would be broken from the start. The TPM provides a secure root to start the cryptographic validation from, and while you can mod the software, it will be immediately evident from the attestation, and they will simply not serve the video. Or in the case of a GPU, you can have the PC attest to the drivers being official and unmodified, and if that doesn't happen the GPU refuses to clock up the memory bus, if the workload displays the characteristics of mining (100% memory load, flat and constant and low shader load).
At best it will be an arms race between TPM developers and adblock devs.
There is also the "analog gap", but that's been notionally plugged for years using HDCP. Early implementations were quickly broken, HDCP 2.3 is still doing pretty well, and it provides a massive speedbump to people who think they're just going to plug a capture card in and loop the video through.
Netflix and others have been doing this for years and the tricks are well-known at this point. Netflix doesn't push too hard, but they won't serve you the highest-quality video if you don't have a secure signal path either.
AFAIK at this point most of the "ripping" of decryption keys/etc for streaming content happens not by attacking the TPM, but by using android devices that are allowed to skate with reduced security modes, and just having a giant stack of them so when one device gets banned they throw it away and move onto the next.
There will always be vulnerabilities and improper implementations and workarounds, but, the entire point of secure enclave is for someone at netflix or your employer's HQ to be comfortable knowing they have a toehold in your machine that can't be broken via Remote Attestation, and that there is no way for you to get the keys out of it when it's acting as a HSM.
You can always disable it/etc, or use another browser (like firefox) that doesn't provide a secure enclave. But then, google won't serve you video, just like netflix reduces the stream quality for people who don't have the hardware DRM set up right.
Since 95% of the world is already using chrome anyway (other than ios), this is a pretty low-risk move.
that'd be infeasible to do given the sheer volume of videos uploaded per day. even if we limited it to the most subscribed creators (10m+ subs) it'd be hard for pirates to keep up.
Not to mention seeding. If we had enough seeders to keep that sort of volume up, those p2p video services would be in a much better state.
Oh, they did something with it – cancelled it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...
I’d happily pay for just no ads.
Twitter is pretty much useless unless you have an account, can't even see replies anymore.
In the end, if the only way to block the ads is to have a setup so complicated that only 1 in 10,000 people would be able and willing to maintain it, that’s basically perfect. The people who will spend hours and hours perfecting and maintaining their ad blocking setup were never going to buy premium anyway and they’re negligible drains on resources.
Fakeable of course, but it's not DOM element removal, it's not how current blockers (have had to) work.
What's your standard then? "It's my right to get whatever content/service I want for free and without ads, and I'll only pay if I feel like it"?
YouTube is a video sharing platform. It's not sharing if I have to pay in cash or time.
No thanks. Not so long as the service is owned by a corporation who does not respect users.
If I pay for something then I own it. Therefore I should receive a copy of it and can view it as many times as I like on any device I like. Youtube does not do this, so I won't pay for it. I see no value in paying for a delivery mechanism when the mechanism itself is hostile to owning the content.
I'll pay for the content by paying the producers directly if I see value in the content. I have done exactly this.
Do you apply the same "If I pay for something then I own it" rule to content you consume via TV subscription services? What about if you pay to view a movie in a theater?
Yes. I don't pay for TV subscription services. What little TV I watch is freely received from broadcasts and can quite simply, and legally, be recorded.
> What about if you pay to view a movie in a theater?
No. I pay for the experience of being at the theater. The movie is irrelevant. It's like paying for the experience of being at a well groomed park with staff paid to maintain the grounds. Also, I rarely go to theaters because their experiences are terrible and aren't well groomed parks; I only go with friends which is then a group activity. Group activities certainly don't convey the same type of ownership.
Quite simply: I do not believe in renting.
Without a TEE (eg. trustzone), you're not going to get anything above 540p, at least with widevine. Note TEE is baked into the SoC itself, so while it's not impossible to find a bug, it's much harder than finding a exploit in android or system apps.
There are others though.
What the hell. Is this an entire OS?
This is the script: https://github.com/danisztls/yt-assistant. AFAIK the same can be done with a single line yt-dlp command and you can do the same to download all videos from a channel.
At this point I prefer to support the creators directly through patreon or other ways than google, who doesn’t care about either users, content makers nor anybody else except their own bottom line.
Genuinely curious what the principled argument is here.
I just have to figure out how to implement sponsor-block, to remove the "this video is sponsored by shadow raid vpn" messages... probably can be done with ffmpeg :)
not that you shouldn't use yt-dlp, because it's great!
and yes, as others mention - you can have yt-dlp use sponsorblock to cut out the ad sections too.
yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove defaultDo you really think Google just set the price arbitrarily? That would be surprising.
My impression has always been that ad free tiers are actually less profitable for video providers.
No, not arbitrarily. But that $14/mo bundles in the price of other services as well, namely Youtube Music. Youtube Music doesn't cost Google nothing, so obviously $14/mo isn't what they're getting from people in ad revenue. A comparable music subscription from spotify costs $11/mo, so subtract that from $14/mo. $3/mo is a fair estimate for what they expect to get for showing ads.
I'd be interested to see those numbers. More importantly though, i don't want to pay more than my share if we're actually talking a fair trade of services here. If the justification is cost of video hosting vs ads i'd see, then it should be variable.
Also, it's including a service i have zero interest in. So upcharging alone is insulting.
Google actually had a system like that in the past, but it wasn't for Youtube, it was for other ads around the web. I used it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not speaking authoritatively.
I’d pay $100 if there was some way to legitimately verify this because it’s nonsense IMO.
How is getting you to pay a reasonable subscription or watch ads in exchange for videos you ostensibly enjoy “gaming you”?
I wouldn’t even notice the subscription costs, but at this point Google has only succeeded in alienating me. I have disproportionately negative feelings about this.
I personally don't even remember what ads are like on Youtube and have zero idea how they've changed since the Youtube Red days.
I'd subscribe to YouTube premium if it didn't bundle a music subscription and associated cost.
If Youtube Premium had FEATURES I cared about, I would pay for it. I refuse to pay for the privilege of basic information hygiene.
A temporal URL here uses different random looking values for the each user rather than a fixed one (like a URL shorter), and encode a validity window (not before/after).
The core idea here being that the code in the app doesn’t know the difference between ads and user content, which would make it very difficult for any intermediary to do so. And, if if they did the URL for the “real” content wouldn’t work until the time to play the ad had passed - so what’d be the point in bothering?
Like others have said - ya just have to pay for the things you value. No shame in being thrifty, but as I learned from my first employer: pick great suppliers and never force them out of business.
I really hope that that would be enough to finally coax the antitrust regulators into doing something.
So it uses redis and elastic search in the backend.
It definitely isnt lightweight, but I like its interface the best out of all solutions.
It sounds like a reasonable principle to me.
That's false.
I'm not a creator but a while ago there was this creator who was widely applauded on HN for their transparency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34225192 Scroll down a bit and you can see Google shows that they made $27,099.86 from YouTube premium.
I reckon you don't subscribe to premium because you think every random channel of every random video you happen to watch deserves your money? I certainly don't feel bad when my adblock prevents me from wasting any more of my time when I click on a clickbait-ty Linus Tech Tips video.
It's sad that the creators have to get caught in the middle of this, of course, but they can be supported through other platforms, like Patreon, ko-fi, etc., which kinda solves the issue. Or better yet, a YouTube replacement, like Nebula.
In fact, how about we all rally together and start encouraging addings ads on HackerNews to help pay for the servers?
I suspect whatever the answer we settle on, it'll be less awful than what exists now.
I want to pay for what i use. Definitely. I struggle to see how a few dozen videos in hosting fees and possible ad revenue accounts to $14/m. It's insulting, upcharged, loaded with data mining and obfuscated for extreme profit in my assumption.
If they want to use ads as a justification for paying, great - show me how much i owe. How me how much money they missed out on by ads and i'll pay that happily. That also directly correlates to content creators, which is a win win.
It's kinda cute how much you care about the profit margins of a company when it will (likely) never benefit you. Maybe you should setup a donation fund for Alphabet in these hard times.
I mean surely you would personally give them at least 20 USD considering how badly they are being wronged, maybe 100 if you are feeling generous.
Do you think Youtube wants creators to do that? Youtube doesn't get a cut of that revenue, whereas Youtube does get a cut of regular Youtube ad revenue and Premium revenue.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Youtube, and am just speculating here.
Perhaps Google should think upon how things ended up this way then?
Like, there are some pretty clear problems with Google's approach to (at least) YouTube, and they don't seem to really want to fix them...
Then ads moved to flash (security issues), popups, popups when you close the first popup, video was added, with sounds, two banners became 20, fixed location floating divs were added, and in the case of youtube, a 3 minute video of something contains 3 minutes of ads.
So yeah... they had a chance, went way overboard, and now they complain that people block ads.
The "old" internet was also run by hobbyists without a profit motive, and did not have sites that hosted your videos for free. A few static banner ads might be able to keep the "old" internet afloat, but it certainly would not be able to keep today's internet afloat.
Then the internet ran on an investor bubble that let companies serve content at a loss in hopes of a future acquisition.
Now ads are proving to be the only reliable way to get income out of videos. There are affordable options out there, but because these services were once free everybody feels like they're entitled to free hosting and media.
Also, real-life ads need regulation too... like some limits of X square meters of ads per 1 km^2 of area... preferably X going slowly towards zero.
Seems like a small price to pay for a YouTube with integrity that respects both creators and viewers and treats both fairly without trying to exploit anyone.
Google’s problem is that their mission statement is fundamentally misleading. They aren’t here to organize the world’s information and make it accessible, they are here to maximize ad revenue. The information thing is a means to an end. For them, ads are the point, because content doesn’t generate revenue - ads do.
Only ensuring that they will try to show even more ads since not enough paying customers exist?
Don’t you think that maybe if all the people in this thread being really righteous about not paying and “ad company“ or to actually pay it might show them there’s a better way?
> I am not fine paying to enrich organizations that engage in widespread surveillance and ad technology
And you don’t see an issue with these two statements?
According to this article, when Youtube red was introduced in October 2015, it was $9.99/month. It's now $13.99/month. That's a 40% increase. If you adjust $9.99 in October 2015 for inflation to September 2023, it's $12.93/month. So inflation-adjusted, the price increased 8.2% from 2015 to now.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9566973/youtube-red-ad-f...
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=9.99&year1=201...
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Youtube.
* Increases in income of the population then vs now, which would be good for comparing the economy then vs now (e.g. median income then vs now)
* Increases in income following cohorts, which would be good for see how on average individual people's income has risen due to both the economy and gained experience (e.g. 25 year old in 2015 would be 33 now, and thus likely make more money both due to population-wide changes (e.g. inflation) and due to having more work experience)
* Increases in income of a few individual people (the example you provided)
For the first one, this page[1], says that in 2021 dollars, the median US household income was $68410, and in 2022 (also in 2021 dollars) it was $74580. So adjusting those back to their in-year dollars, that would be $61,426.62 in 2015[2] and $86,662.50 in 2023[3]. So adjusting the Youtube Red/Premium price change, to those numbers, results in Youtube Red/Premium decreasing price by 0.7% once adjusted for the US population's medium household income.
For the second one, I think adjusting for that would should the price decreasing even more. Because each individual person's experience increases, so you would expect an individual's income to increase more than the population's income.
For the third one, I don't see how it's useful to look at a few examples. One person's income might have doubled, showing the Youtube Red/Premium dropped drastically in price. Another person's income might have halved, showing Youtube Red/Premium increases drastically in price. Another person might have become unemployed, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price increased by infinity %. Another person might have gone from unemployed to having a job, showing Youtube Red/Premium's price decreases from infinity % of income to non-infinity % of income, so basically a decrease by inifnity %.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=68410&year1=20...
[3] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=74580&year1=20...
Google Play Music didn't remove Youtube ads back then. Youtube Red wasn't created until 2015. So you're comparing the price of something that didn't remove Youtube ads to the price of something that does remove Youtube ads. That's not a fair comparison.
But if a creator I like gets a big bill, I’ll take their video and re-upload it without their permission to mirror it and cut down their bandwidth bill.
Now I only pay $400/mo!”
If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators. I think that is pretty damn impressive. I use YouTube often, and I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
Same. Unfortunately, YouTube is a dopamine slot machine that makes money off ads shown on (often inappropriate) videos that keep kids addicted to their phones. It's also a site that constantly invades their users privacy. It also boosts often irrevelant and trashy channels to the front page. It's also a total CPU/RAM hog, its app is constantly getting slower, and generally a piss poor experience all around. Using Invidious/Newpipe/Youtube-DL makes all of this painfully obvious. If YouTube were a service that cost $5 a month, had no invasive tracking, and wasn't 95% garbage videos by "influencers" trying to hit the algorithm jackpot, I'd pay for it.
> If the costs of managing HackerNews is so high, sure let them sell ads or offer a subscription service. But if you are comparing HackerNews hosting costs to YouTube, you need a reality check. HackerNews probably costs less than 1000$ a month to host, everything included. I am sure YouTube spends more than that every second buying new storage servers.
My point is, none of us really know what it costs to host Hackernews, YouTube, or any website on the internet, and we don't know if any of these sites are struggling financially or need our financial support.
> I don't think most people realize the scale of YouTube - it's offering anyone on this planet to upload as many videos as they want, in resolution as high as 8K, while also offering the ability to monetize their content for creators.
Yes. Unfortunately, they don't do that for creators or users. They do that so they can sell more ads.
> I am totally fine with them making money off my data via ads (when I am not paying for YouTube premium).
I am glad you are fine with it. I just wish you were fine with people being able to choose what data their browsers download.
For youtube, we don't even have good estimates for how much data they're dealing with.
What certainly is being proven in multiple courts, though, is Google's malfeasance and manipulation to create and abuse an advertising monopoly.
Still, I think you see my point.
Lol. You want to pay what you want to pay.
> show me how much i owe
It’s not complicated. $13.99 for a subscription to YouTube Premium in the US.
https://www.investopedia.com/youtube-premium-now-costs-usd2-...
Do you go to the grocery store and say, “Show me the baker’s salary as well as what the wheat, yeast, salt, and water cost and I’ll pay that happily?” No, you pay what they charge for bread or you don’t buy bread or you steal the bread.
And remember that YouTube Premium includes other benefits like downloading videos: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en so it’s not a 1:1 exchange of the money they’d make from ads.
Lol you understand, you're clearly avoiding the core idea.
> Do you go to the grocery store and say, “Show me the baker’s salary as well as what the wheat, yeast, salt, and water cost and I’ll pay that happily?” No, you pay what they charge for bread or you don’t buy bread or you steal the bread.
The grocery store isn't offering a free product with ads vs a paid subscription, using the missed ads as justification for paying. The grocery store isn't forcing you to also buy steak if you want to buy bread. The grocery store isn't offering a single tier price, subsidizing those who eat a lot by those who eat a little.
In the grocery store if you listen to a little, you pay a little. With Spotify, i can subscribe to a single service without upcharging to the $30/m unlimited podcasts (though that's changing it feels like, and i'll cancel them too). In the grocery store, if you buy a product you like you support that content creator by the amount they agreed to.
By justifying paying for missing ads they put a relationship between ads and the "cost we're stealing". So i'm offering to pay what i'm "stealing", but of course that's no where near enough because there's no way the handful of videos i watch a month equates to $14/m.
Look i agree with you in principle. Believe it or not, i'm not justifying avoiding ads and "stealing". I am however, saying everything Youtube has done is scummy and i'd much rather see content creators move to something that is inline with both the creators and the viewers. Where data isn't harvested in mass. Where outrage algorithms don't reign supreme.
I'm not paying Facebook anymore than i'm paying Youtube.
edit: Keep in mind i pay for a lot of services. Hell i pay for my search! You know what my search does? Be honest, transparent, and clear in the relationship between what i'm buying and what i'm getting (Kagi, btw)
> So i'm offering to pay what i'm "stealing", but of course that's no where near enough because there's no way the handful of videos i watch a month equates to $14/m.
You don’t set the price (and you know you don’t yet you offer anyway)!
And the price literally does equate to $14/m if you watch those videos without ads. You can use whatever logical argument you want to convince yourself otherwise, but the numbers are right there.
If you block ads on YouTube and you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, you’re doing something you know you’re not supposed to do. Twist yourself into a pretzel to explain that it’s technically not actually stealing, but it is what it is.
Pay $14/month, watch ads, or stop watching YouTube if your moral outrage at their scummyness is that high. Or do whatever you want because it really doesn’t matter.
You do. Ascribe a value to the data you give up to them by consuming content on their platform. They do.
Are you suggesting that Youtube squeeze out more money per view than it's currently doing? How do you suggest doing this? I guess one way would be to block people from using adblockers...
Yea, i literally said you understand.
As an aside, i really hope Youtube finds a way to block all adblocks. I want more viewers for competition in the subscription space to exist.
If the creators need their income to be resilient to demonetisation, they're forced to use options outside the Youtube system. Sponsorships, etc.
Google isn’t exactly struggling to make ends meet. They seem perfectly okay to be losing money on search. YouTube is no different.
I’m serious, but philosophically, the onus is clearly on us to get rid of our addiction. But Youtube is a quasi-monopoly of random micro-conferences. Nebula and Vimeo aren’t on the same market. So basically we specifically like Youtube. But I’d never pay Google after what they did to James Damore.
Compelling my own property to behave against my wishes is the moral failing.
Not to mention literally stealing original content and granting it to anyone else who simply claims copyright without proving it or being able to prove it since it's not theirs.
Then there are all kinds of indirect ways as a consequence of their various policies and how they implement and enforce them, like showing me ads after taking my premium money, or collecting and selling the profiling data of my watch/like/dislike data, etc.
It's no different than price points, not showing the amount of ads the market will bear is leaving money on the table.
The mail example is great. The post office has no right to withhold your other mail between someone else and yourself, because you threw away the ad flyer someone paid them to deliver.
Meanwhile, I pay for premium and still have to suffer ads, because every video has ads in-band in the content, and I have to watch youtube on someone else's device probably 30% of the time, and have my content (what I would consume not produce) censored and inhibited by bs ai "community standards" and dmca takedowns I didn't approve of, and even without ever looking at an ad, they are collecting and selling profiling data of me which I also don't approve of. So where's my option to strong-arm youtube to force them to fully meet my "terms" and get what I'm paying for? How come it's not reasonable for me to somehow make it that if they don't please ME, that their own server side somehow breeaks unless they conform to what decide is a reasonable fair transaction?
None of this "terms" argument holds up. All they have is might, not right.
I didn't have time this week to become Jeff Bezos and buy Google and fix Youtube.
And thanks for the life advice acdha, but I'm quite happy to continue 'stealing' every single second of content that I want from Google and pointing out that the platform is filled with trash, incentivizes trash, and we would all be better off if it was gone.
Ie show me the ads i'm missing, and let me pay for the view. It would be what, $3|5|7/m or w/e in value? Instead they're trying to strongarm you into an upcharge of $14/m for additional services. Show me the data they're harvesting from my viewing patterns and the added revenue they're getting from that. Tie that into my "cost" each month and reducing how much i owe.
But of course they won't do that. Because this isn't an exchange. This isn't a service we're paying for, it's a data harvest where they want to have their cake and eat it too. This is scummy in the same way that my music software, Spotify, is trying to expand revenue streams and shoving more crap (podcasts, audio books, etc) down my throat.
If Youtube isn't going to try and play fair then i'd rather leave (and will) than pay them.
That would only be true if Youtube proportionally split my subscription to the videos i watch.
If anything, i'm advocating for exactly what you said - more than Youtube is. Ie show me how much i owe, and then whatever money i give youtube goes to content creators and the service provider. It's proportional to the service i consume, and is ultimately fair.
Instead what we get is something (in my view) massively upcharged. Bundled with service(s) i don't use, and set at a price point that i suspect well exceeds my usage of the service.
And as an added bonus, if you subscribe you get no ads on youtube! :-P
It's wild how many people unironically think "drink verification can" is in any way acceptable.
Just because someone has an internet connection doesn't mean google has to serve them videos, either.
You act like that's a gotcha when "I owe you nothing, you owe me nothing" is the state I'm arguing for.
I hope they get a big fat EU fine for (illegal here) joint sales.
